Scoble gets face off’ed on Facebook: another justification for OpenSocial?

So the year in tech has begun with Robert Scoble getting canned from Facebook for violating part of the company’s terms of service. We have interesting coverage from the Canadians Tris Hussey and Mark Evans – Tris hints a boycott of Facebook (well not really):

Why does this matter in Canada? Why am I writing about this here instead of on my personal blog you wonder? Simply this, Canada has probably the highest percentage of Facebook users of any country. Toronto has a million (that’s a third of the population people) and half of Canadians online are on Facebook. So if there is any country where this should be a hot button issue-it’s here!

Last year, the concept of OpenSocial was brought up. This was basically a way of saying that you would only need one ID that could be applied to all social networking sites like Multiply, Facebook and Friendster, for us in the Philippines:

What is OpenSocial?
The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In short, if one service gets canned, you still have others to use. OpenSocial aggregates your entire online presence into one entity. It’s sorta like a Yahoo! ID, Google GMail account or an MSN ID but on a much larger scale.

Ah yes, it’s barely a week into the new year and we already have a controversy.

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2 Responses to “Scoble gets face off’ed on Facebook: another justification for OpenSocial?”

Nope. OpenSocial is basically: write an app once and it can be deployed on any compatible social network. And no, these deployed apps cannot interact with other networks. So it doesn’t solve the problem you think it is.